Nozick and Rawls on the Limits of Utilitarianism
Introduction
Utilitarianism, the view that moral and political arrangements should maximize overall happiness or welfare, has long been the most influential consequentialist theory in modern moral philosophy. Yet it has also provoked some of the sharpest critiques. Two of the most famous come from Robert Nozick and John Rawls—philosophers who otherwise stand on opposing ends of the political spectrum.
Both reject utilitarianism for treating individuals as mere instruments of aggregate welfare, but they diverge in what they see as the proper replacement: for Rawls, a just society must be built on fairness and reciprocity; for Nozick, on inviolable individual rights. Their shared target is the same arithmetic of the good; their moral topographies, entirely different.
I. Utilitarianism’s Core Assumptions
Before turning to the critiques, it helps to recall what utilitarianism assumes:
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Consequentialism — the moral worth of actions or institutions depends only on outcomes.
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Aggregation — outcomes are evaluated by summing or averaging the welfare of all affected individuals.
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Impartiality — every person’s welfare counts equally in the calculus.
In this vision, moral life becomes a kind of mathematics of happiness: right action is whatever maximizes the net positive experience across society.
Nozick and Rawls each find this picture both elegant and grotesque — elegant in its clarity, grotesque in its blindness to moral boundaries.
II. Nozick’s Refutation: The Inviolability of the Individual
Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) attacks utilitarianism by insisting that it violates the separateness of persons. For him, individuals are ends in themselves, not vessels for collective pleasure.
His famous Utility Monster thought experiment exposes the logic’s absurd conclusion: if one being could experience a thousand times more pleasure from every resource than anyone else, then pure utilitarianism would justify feeding everything to it. The monster’s existence reveals that utilitarianism permits infinite inequality if it maximizes total happiness.
A second argument, the Experience Machine, challenges the utilitarian reduction of value to felt pleasure. If offered a machine that could generate endless blissful experiences indistinguishable from reality, most people would decline to enter — suggesting that we value authenticity, autonomy, and real relations more than subjective wellbeing.
Taken together, these arguments show that utilitarianism commodifies experience and sacrifices persons. For Nozick, the moral world cannot be a pleasure market: each person possesses rights as moral side constraints on what others (and the state) may do, regardless of the greater good. “There are things no person or group may do to others,” he writes, “without violating their rights.”
Utilitarianism’s sin, then, is totalitarian benevolence: it licenses tyranny in the name of welfare.
III. Rawls’s Refutation: Justice as Fairness
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) begins from a similar intuition — that utilitarianism fails to respect persons as distinct centers of value — but develops a very different solution.
Where Nozick’s concern is libertarian autonomy, Rawls’s is moral reciprocity. In his view, utilitarianism “does not take seriously the distinction between persons,” because it allows gains to some to outweigh losses to others without their consent.
To correct this, Rawls constructs the original position and the veil of ignorance: a hypothetical situation in which rational agents, ignorant of their own status or abilities, must agree on the principles governing society. From this position of equality, no one would consent to rules that might leave them destitute for the sake of others’ happiness.
The result is his two principles of justice:
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Equal basic liberties for all.
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The difference principle, permitting inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged.
For Rawls, utilitarianism fails because it ignores fair terms of cooperation and the moral arbitrariness of fortune. Justice must be structured so that outcomes are acceptable to all from a standpoint of equality, not simply maximal from a standpoint of efficiency.
IV. Points of Convergence and Divergence
Both thinkers:
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Reject aggregation: individuals cannot be traded off as if they were units of pleasure.
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Reassert moral boundaries: each person has a claim that resists being absorbed into the collective calculus.
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Value autonomy: Nozick through rights, Rawls through reciprocal consent.
But their divergences are equally sharp:
| Aspect | Nozick | Rawls |
|---|---|---|
| Moral Foundation | Deontological rights of individuals | Fairness and reciprocity among equals |
| View of the State | Minimal; protect rights only | Active; design institutions for fairness |
| Conception of Value | Liberty as inviolability | Justice as fairness |
| Relation to Utilitarianism | Moral rejection on grounds of inviolability | Structural replacement via contractarian reasoning |
Where Nozick’s world risks fragmentation — each person sovereign, moral life bounded by non-interference — Rawls’s world risks paternalism — a state that continually adjusts inequalities in the name of fairness. Both, however, are haunted by utilitarianism’s shadow: the tension between individual inviolability and collective wellbeing.
V. Broader Implications
In a deeper sense, both critiques mark a historical turn: the exhaustion of quantitative moral reason. Nozick and Rawls each refuse the Enlightenment dream of calculating the good, but they do so from within its rational structure — replacing the calculus of pleasure with the calculus of rights or fairness. The moral arithmetic remains; only the unit of measurement changes.
Their refutations thus expose the central crisis of modern ethics: the search for moral order after the collapse of utilitarian aggregation. How can we preserve both individuality and community without returning to intuition or transcendence?
Neither philosopher solves the problem, but both reframe it. Nozick reminds us that morality begins with the prohibition against use; Rawls that justice requires conditions of mutual justification. Together they leave utilitarianism’s ambition—to rationalize the good—stripped of innocence.
Conclusion
Nozick and Rawls dismantle utilitarianism from opposite poles:
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For Nozick, it erases the person by subsuming her into the total;
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For Rawls, it erases fairness by allowing fortune to dictate sacrifice.
Where utilitarianism asks, What yields the greatest happiness?, both respond: At what cost to whom? In that question lies the enduring moral residue of their shared revolt against the calculus of utility.
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